Posts tagged with 'android'

One Plus has always provided cutting edge phones at less than half the price of leading branding. Today they launched the One Plus 3 with some great specifications. The good thing is, you don’t an invite anymore.

Amazon.com has dropped the pricing for Nexus 6. The Nexus has had a good reputation of top notch hardware at a reasonable price. However this changed with the Nexus 6 launch. While it was great hardware, it wasn’t cheap this time.

Now Nexus 6 is finally had a price dropped and it now makes sense. A new Nexus is expected soon and hence the price drop but it still looks good.

For those who came in late, here is whats interesting about the Nexus 6:

Last month, LinuxGizmos.com and the Linux Foundation’s Linux.com community website sponsored a 10-day SurveyMonkey survey that asked readers of both sites to choose their favorite three Linux- or Android-based open-spec single-board computers. This year, 1,721 respondents — more than twice the number from the 2014 survey — selected their favorites from a list of 53 SBCs, compared to last year’s 32.

My setup:

Laptop with Ubuntu 14.04LTS and Nexus 4.

I also assume you are comfortable with the command prompt. You need to run some commands from terminal.

If you are already running Android 5.0, you can skip Step 1 and go directly to Step 2 to root your device. In my case, I didn’t wait for the OTA update, but if you prefer to play it safe, get the Android 5.0 update and then start.

Pre-Preparation.

Make sure your laptop is charged or plugged into the power and your phone is charged too.

Take a full system backup, because these steps wipes the Android clean.

And ensure your laptop doesn’t go into suspend mode while you do this.

I was watching the iPhone 6 launch last night and was wonder what the fuss is all about? Well it’s from Apple and people may be drooling.

Lets find out how the iPhone 6 compares with the Leading Android phones. I am only comparing the specifications and features and not the actually quality which is very subjective.

Here is Apple iPhone vs Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One M8 and Xiaomi MI3. Galaxy S5 and One M8 are the premium Android phones while the MI3 is the poor man’s option or the rich mans budget phone which ever way you look at it.

Features

iPhone 6

Galaxy S5

One M8

MI3

FingerPrint Sensor

Yes

Yes

No

No

Dust Resistant

No

Yes

No

No

Water Resistant

No

Yes

No

No

Screen Size

4.7″

5.1″

5.0″

5.0″

Resolution

750 x 1334

1080 x 1920

1080 x 1920

1080 x 1920

Full HD

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

RAM

1 GB

2 GB

2 GB

2 GB

Memory Card Slot

No

Yes

Yes

No

Primary Camera

8 MP

16 MP

Dual 4MP

13 MP

Selfie Camera

1.2 MP

2 MP

5MP

2MP

CPU

Dual-core
1.4 GHz

Quad-core 2.5 GHz

Quad-core 2.3/2.5 GHz

Quad-core
2.3 GHz

FM Radio

No

No

Yes

Yes

4G LTE

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

As you can see the Android variants are leading in almost all the specifications which does matter. This includes the inexpensive Xiaomi Rather than innovating, Apple seems to only playing catch-up. Apply skillfully hides the finer specifications. Its your choice to stand in the queue for iPhone 6 or go with an Android at a cheaper price.

Ever since we started building the Ubuntu SDK, we’ve been trying to find ways of bringing the vast number of Android apps that exist over to Ubuntu. As with any new platform, there’s a chasm between Android apps and native apps that can only be crossed through the effort of porting.

There are simple solutions, of course, like providing an Android runtime on Ubuntu. On other platforms, those have shown to present Android apps as second-class citizens that can’t benefit from a new platform’s unique features. Worse, they don’t provide a way for apps to gradually become first-class citizens, so chasm between Android and native still exists, which means the vast majority of apps supported this way will never improve.

There are also complicates solutions, like code conversion, that try to translate Android/Java code into the native platform’s language and toolkit, preserving logic and structure along the way. But doing this right becomes such a monumental task that making a tool to do it is virtually impossible, and the amount of cleanup and checking needed to be done by an actual developer quickly rises to the same level of effort as a manual port would have. This approach also fails to take advantage of differences in the platforms, and will re-create the old way of doing things even when it doesn’t make sense on the new platform.

NDR takes a different approach to these, it doesn’t let you run our Android code on Ubuntu, nor does it try to convert your Android code to native code. Instead NDR will re-create the general framework of your Android app as a native Ubuntu app, converting Activities to Pages, for example, to give you a skeleton project on which you can build your port. It won’t get you over the chasm, but it’ll show you the path to take and give you a head start on it. You will just need to fill it in with the logic code to make it behave like your Android app. NDR won’t provide any of logic for you, and chances are you’ll want to do it slightly differently than you did in Android anyway, due to the differences between the two platforms.

To test NDR during development, I chose the Telegram app because it was open source, popular, and largely used Android’s layout definitions and components. NDR will be less useful against apps such as games, that use their own UI components and draw directly to a canvas, but it’s pretty good at converting apps that use Android’s components and UI builder.

After only a couple days of hacking I was able to get NDR to generate enough of an Ubuntu SDK application that, with a little bit of manual cleanup, it was recognizably similar to the Android app’s.

This proves, in my opinion, that bootstrapping an Ubuntu port based on Android source code is not only possible, but is a viable way of supporting Android app developers who want to cross that chasm and target their apps for Ubuntu as well. I hope it will open the door for high-quality, native Ubuntu app ports from the Android ecosystem. There is still much more NDR can do to make this easier, and having people with more Android experience than me (that would be none) would certainly make it a more powerful tool, so I’m making it a public, open source project on Launchpad and am inviting anybody who has an interest in this to help me improve it.

Huawei’s MediaPad X1 is not only a good alternative to an iPad Mini but also has phone capabilities. Announced at Mobile World Congress and expected to be launched in March 2014.

Claimed to be the slimmest 7″ tablet, Here is what is cool about it:

3G with calling facility

4G LTE (optional)

Quad Core Processor

2 GB RAM

7″ Full HD, IPS panel

13 MP camera (sony lens), with 5 MP secondary camera

16 GB Internal storage

Expandable MicroSD slot

5000 mAh battery, which is powerful enough and can also be used to charge other devices

WiFi b/g/n, Dual Band in the 4G version

Active Noise Cancellation

Bluetooth 4.0

Just 239g lightweight and slim

Here are the limitations:

No Android KitKat, there is no plans or commitment for Huawei.

Little awkward to use a phone because of the large size.

Since today’s phones don’t even last a day, you should use your primary phone for voice only, and use this device for all data activities. The X1 could be good tablet device but little awkward to hold as a phone. Could be used with Bluetooth as a phone.

Rubin recounted his first meeting with Samsung’s executives by saying “You and what army are going to go and create this? You have six people. Are you high?’ is basically what they said. They laughed me out of the boardroom. This happened two weeks before Google acquired us.” Considering that there were actually eight people on the team for Android, it shows that they really did not care for the company at all.

Back to 2005. Google CEO Larry Page agrees to meet with Rubin and loves the idea. Google had been looking for an innovation to bring to the mobile industry, and they were afraid that another company, such as Microsoft with their massive resources, would beat them to it. Page offered to purchase Android for $50 million and some various perks, and the whole original Android team was absorbed into Mountain View at Google HQ, and thus began the story of Android, and how it was not taken by Samsung but rather the innovative Google.

A friend of mine was looking for a budget phone with a lot of features. While there are bigger brands which are more expensive, I came across Xolo Q3000 which offers similar features at an affordable price.

Here is what I liked about it:

5.7″ IPS full HD display – good if you like big displays

1,5 GHz Quad Core Processor

2 GB RAM – enough to run many applications

4000 mAh battery – this is almost double than most phones, will give you a charge for days not hours!

Dual SIM

13 MP Camera

16 GB built in Memory with MicroSD Slot

Android 4.2

Micro USB and USB on-the-go

Although I haven’t used a Xolo myself, I have also heard about some issues with Xolo’s service.

The competitions (namely Micromax and Intex) are about to launch Octo-core processors (8 cores), I don’t know how much better performance you will derive but for now this looks like a good phone.

This week I’ve been hacking some of the initrd scripts in Ubuntu Touch and I thought that I’d share some of the things I learned. All of this work is based on using Image Update images, which are flashable by doing phablet-flash ubuntu-system. First, why would you want to do this? Well, the initrd includes a script called “touch” which sets up all of the partitions and does some first boot migration. I wanted to modify how this process works for some experiments on customizing the images.

Before getting started, you need the following packages installed on your dev box: abootimg, android-tools-adb, android-tools-fastboot

Note: I was told after posting this that it won’t work on some devices, including Samsung devices, because they use a non-standard boot.img format.

Getting the initrd

The initrd is inside the boot.img file. I pulled mine from here, but you can also get it by dding it off of the phone. You can find the boot partition on your device with the following scriptlet, taken from flash-touch-initrd:

Once you have the boot.img file by whatever means you used, you need to unpack it. abootimg is the tool to use here, so simply run abootimg -x [boot.img]. This will unpack the initrd, kernel and boot config file.

Unpacking and Hacking the initrd

Now that you have the initrd, you need to unpack it so you can make changes. You can do this with some cpio magic, but unless you have a UNIX-sized beard, just run abootimg-unpack-initrd . This will dump everything into a folder named ramdisk. (UNIX beard guys: mkdir ramdisk; cp initrd ramdisk; cd ramdisk; cat initrd | gzip -d | cpio -i)

To make changes, simply cd into ramdisk and hack away. For this example, I’m going to add a simple line to ramdisk/scriprts/touch. My line is

echo "mfisch: it worked!" > /dev/kmsg || true

This will log a message to /var/log/kern.log which can assist us to make sure it worked. Your change will probably be less trivial.

Repacking

Repacking the initrd is simple. To repack, just run abootimg-pack-initrd [initrd.img.NEW] Once you do this you’ll notice that the initrd size is quite different, even if you didn’t make any changes. After discussing this with some people, the best I can figure is that the newly packed cpio file has owners and non-zero datestamps, which make it slightly larger. One clue, when compared to mkinitramfs, abootimg-pack does not use the -R 0:0 argument and there are other differences. If you want to do this the hard way, you can also repack by doing: cd ramdisk; find . | cpio -o -H newc | gzip -9 > ../initrd.img.NEW

Rebuilding the boot image

The size change we discussed above can be an issue that you need to fix. In the file bootimg.cfg, which you extracted with abootimg -x, there is a line called bootsize. This line needs to be >= the size of the boot.img (not initrd). If the initrd file jumped by 4k or so, like mine did, be sure to bump this as well. I bumped mine from 0x837000 to 0x839000 and it worked. If you don’t do this step, you will wind up with a non-booting image. Once you correct this, rebuild the image with abootimg:

"It's interesting to watch the Ubuntu phone development process, even as those who are satisfied with Android phone or iPhones, ask, 'Why?' We could ask the same about the Firefox OS Phone, too. Maybe the most realistic answer in both cases is, 'Because we could.'"

I'd like to take a crack at answering that question...

Android, iOS, and Blackberry started with a phone, and have spent years adding general computing capabilities

Ubuntu started with a general purpose operating system, and recently added the ability to make phone calls

And frankly, as we're on the technical cusp of device convergence...

what I really want

is a general purpose PC,

that fits in my pocket,

and makes phone calls too!

I believe that the latter approach will actually succeed in that endeavor.

While Samsung is busy launching the Galaxy Grand and Micromax the A116 Canvas HD, Karbonn has launched the S1 Titanium.

All of them are big screen phablets (phone+tablets) and here is what is common and whats not.

Dual Sim

1GB RAM

Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)

Here is the difference, Lets see which one rocks.

Samsung Galaxy Grand

Micromax A116 Canvas HD

Karbonn S1 Titanium

Display Size

5″

5″

4.5″

Display Size

480 x 800, 187 ppi

720 x 1280 pixels, 294 ppi

540 x 960 pixels, 245ppi

CPU

Dual Core 1.2 GHz

Quad Core 1.2GHz

Quad Core 1.2GHz

Internal Memory

8 GB, expandable to 64

4 GB, expandable to 32

4 GB, expandable to 32

Bluetooth

4.0

2.0

2.0

Primary Camera

8 Megapixel

8 Megapixel

5 Megapixel

Secondary Camera

2 MP

VGA

VGA

Battery

2100 mAh

2100 mAh

1600 mAh

Estimated Pricing

Rs. 21,500

Rs. 14,999

Rs. 10,999

Micromax has the best display, while Karbon has the snappiest Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The Karbonn is the best value for money. The price difference of Rs. 4000 for Micromax is huge, Expect them to drop prices even before it is launched. If the price of Micromax is dropped to around Rs. 13,000 it would be worthy paying the extra over Karbonn.